Get Qualified Leads, Bigger Projects, With No Ads Even If You're ESL

today i'm going to teach you how to get qualified leads better and bigger projects with no ads even if english is not your first language you're not a good writer you're not an seo expert and you don't have a big social following and i'm going to show you how to do this in six easy to follow steps [Music] what is up futurist future fam donuts donation it's time to step into the dojo today we're gonna talk about how to get qualified leads without spending money on advertising with katie sandell here's what i know about katie she's the ceo and creative director she's a course creator author speaker and educator for graphic designers her mission is to help graphic designers build their design agency katie welcome to the show thank you so much for having me here i'm on the show i'm happy to be here katie thank you for doing this i'm really excited to talk to you today because i believe after this talk our audience is going to have many takeaways that they can implement in their business so for the people who don't know who you are can you introduce yourself yes um my name is katie sandal i'm the ceo and creative director of aventive studio i am originally from serbia but i live in austin texas at the moment and i am also the founder and business educator for graphic designers i help graphic designers to start and build their um design agencies i'm also an author course creator and public speaker and i do masterminds for female graphic designers perfect okay and didn't you write a book too yes i did yes so i wrote the book two years ago and it's called brand fix and it's all about grand strategy for entrepreneurs excellent so what are we going to talk about today yeah so today i'm going to share the formula on how graphic designers or basically any creative person can land their um dream projects so not just dream clients but gym projects great i'm looking forward to that so katie is going to share a presentation with us as she's put together and i'll just i'll just watch intently okay well first of all thank you so much for having me here um on the show i'm happy to be here and i prepared this presentation that really helped me um getting my dream projects so now and this might sound backwards but i'm gonna start with um sharing what didn't work for me um because i feel that a lot of designers can relate to this so i used to have a nine-to-five as a graphic designer and at the same time i started um freelancing on the side but like a lot of first-time um freelancers i was not you know making enough money um i was working 24 7 barely making any money um and eventually i got a lot of random clients and like from all over the place and i even doubled my pricing but still i i was not getting there and i was not able to grow and i would constantly go in this circle of you know chasing clients um a long story short you know i was um i would post on craigslist i would uh connect with people on linkedin i would do instagram um like literally i tried everything but the problem overall was that i was trying to get every possible client instead of focusing on who i want to work with because i thought that the more i do the more clients i will get so my clients were anyone who needed any design services like i would do logos brochures flyers i even learned how to do websites um and i was also competing with every single graphic designer on the web um and i often had to lower my rates to to win projects and now i had always heard this advice uh to like find your niche right and then like to target your marketing to them and i resisted this for a long time but i also knew that if i don't make changes in my business like nothing's gonna change and even though i was afraid to niche down um i knew that nothing's gonna change like i will i will still see the same results right so once i did pick a niche i switched all of my effort towards working with businesses in the health and wellness industry and now the formula that i'm gonna share today on how to land your dream project is not about specializing but specializing um will help for sure and i'm a big fan of specializing and becoming an expert but more on that later so let's talk to the formula and for everyone um like that is watching this if you haven't already uh grab a pen and paper um so you can take notes and move through the formula as we go so the formula all you need is your own website that has a blog on it even if you have never written a blog post before you could use this strategy with your very first blog if you wanted and you don't need to be an amazing writer or an expert in seo and you don't need a big audience you just need to know what kind of project you want to get and then get in your ideal client's head do a little a little bit of research and um write one post that is tailored to exactly what they want and need and you know the end goal is this a person who needs your services finds you easily while they're googling right so the title of your blog is so specific to them that they click on it and you wrote it in such a valuable way that um it speaks to them so for example let's say that you want to get a skincare project and you want to work on their branding website maybe product photography like whatever you offer right so now you have that amazing blog post and i will tell you um how to write it in just a second and you know as that skincare client that ideal client client that has the ideal project and reads it they think okay this person knows what they're talking about they seem to be an expert in exactly what i need and from there this cold lead who knew nothing about you and your business just five minutes ago they were just googling the entire internet to solve their specific problem well that person is now going through your services your portfolio and they're going to contact you they might contact you immediately they might bookmark your website and contact you later but they will contact you if you did everything right and the article was you know useful for them so now for today's presentation i will not talk much about specializing as a graphic designer you know like doing just branding projects or working only a bit um i don't know the health and wellness industry and things like that but specializing is something that helped me go from you know i i need more clients to be booked out for four months it was crazy i just wanted you to understand this concept and um i think chris that this is in one of your um videos on youtube that's something specialized or generalized like niche or broad where you talk about how creatives can specialize um like externally but stay broad internally so if you would like to add something to that feel free to um to do that but if not i will just move um towards the formula i'm leaning in right now because i want to know like how are you going to be able to attract your ideal clients so i think you should just proceed okay perfect so let's go with the step one so step one is to simply imagine a project you would like to get and this sounds so easy and it is it doesn't matter if you are a generalized or specialized graphic designer or even if you're a designer this formula works for every creative it's super simple not easy but simple so in this step i want you to think about a very specific client or project that you would like to um to work with and even even if you already have a niche like i do um i want to get in um like even more specific than usually do so for example my agency does branding for wellness products but right now we would like to work on tea packaging so we would like to get a client that you know has like tea blends or is trying to open a tea house or something like that so something like really really specific um so like what exact clients do you want to work on next so not for the rest of your life just next be specific like have fun with this part it's um like make it feel like a game it's like picking the perfect client out of the air um you know that can be branding for yoga mats it can be video for a bar it can be i don't know rebranding for an italian restaurant like whatever it is so you now have this dream project in your mind right now write that down and also write down what you can offer to that client so just your services you can do um logo brand boards packaging like whatever is that that you offer and this can be you know any other service like if you're a photographer videographer ux designer you can still come up with the exact client you want to work with next and the type of service or package you want to um work with them on so the next step is research so this is our second step and this is the most important step and where we are focusing on the client so with the first step we were focusing on what we want but now we have to figure out what is that not just that they want but what is that that they really really need so you already know what you offer um and who you want to offer it to but let's now work on who we want to work with first you need to learn about uh that industry in general so um i had only worked on one skincare project before i tried this strategy for getting a skincare client so i took some time to google and understand what sites and resources my ideal client would be you know familiar with um i also learned a lot um about manufacturing um how skincare products are being developed such as who creates the formula like i never knew anything about that um i learned about different uh packaging materials product containers and you know these things are not just for the blog we have to think a step further as well like if i get a call from a potential client tomorrow i have to know what they're talking about i have to understand them i have to know their challenges and problems and you know um and i can also i can include this in the blog post but it's more for us to know it and i mean there's nothing stopping you from mentioning the things um if you want in your blog as well um so as an example my agency doesn't do anything social media related so we don't do ads or postings or anything like that but by knowing that skincare companies have a lot of questions about instagram we included a section in our blog about um like social media ideas and examples like things like that and this gives my clients the value and information they want and positions us as an expert even if we aren't um selling or offering those exact services so next think for a moment like about who you would be working with on the project like who is going to be looking for you is that the ceo like if you are working with um smaller companies maybe it's a marketing manager maybe an arts director who is outsourcing like who is the exact person you are trying to um to attract all these people have um different roles and what attracts me as an artist director doesn't mean it will attract the client so so for example i would much rather see like black and white logos from graphic designers versus in mock-ups while clients would like to see mock-ups and everything presented in 3d and things like that the reason why you need to know who is going to look for you is because you want to know more about their demographic and psychographics so you want to know a little bit more about the person who you're going to talk to so just a couple of things like maybe their location age income and things like that but what's more important is to know um like what problems they have their challenges and how they're trying to solve their problems like you don't and as mentioned like you don't need to mention that in your blog post like my reader lives in texas and this is their problem but by um having this clear picture in your mind will improve your writing so that is the whole point here and think of this blog post as a um like super helpful letter that you're going to send directly to that person rather than something you're shouting in a microphone in front of a lot of people because that's why they will um connect um faster and better the next one is you are going to do some seo research and seo stands for search engine optimization and it's how people find you on google or any other search platform um and i know that can sound fancy to some people but really all you need to do for this is google and what you just came up um with about your ideal project and client like nothing else and i'll tell you how to figure out what your clients are searching for in just a second so with google you you don't want to look into just the keywords but also kind of like key phrases basically what is this specific ideal client typing into google because if your post matches that google will eventually figure that out and move your posts up so your client your client can find you faster but here first i um want to talk about what is that that didn't work for us because i don't want you to make the same mistake as me when this presentation is over so we used to write blog posts and they talked about health and wellness branding those were the keywords we used all the time in our blog like wellness branding or health and wellness branding sometimes maybe wellness marketing because we were thinking what would a health and wellness entrepreneur need to know about this topic but here is um what we learned even though health and wellness branding is our niche um my typical ideal client is not googling terms like health and wellness like wellness branding that is how we think of it internally but remember you need to get in their head and think about what they are googling so someone starts a skincare company they are going to google skincare branding or skincare packaging or skincare marketing even so they aren't looking for um information on the entire wellness industry they're only googling what matters to them right so the same is true if you are a graphic designer and you want to learn more about getting clients like you're most likely going to google how to get clients as a graphic designer versus how to get clients online just an example so now if you're thinking okay but how do i know what they are googling there are some tools like google keyword planner and google keyword planner will help you to see um the search volume of different keywords you also need to do some quick brainstorming based on the ideal client profile you thought of and you know try to picture what they would really need and to read or learn about and i recommend when you start writing the blog post i recommend you narrow it down to one primary keyword or phrase that covers the whole article like skincare branding right and then maybe three to four secondary keywords which will just be a part of the article so these secondary keywords could be skincare packaging skincare i don't know social media how to sell skincare products like those secondary ones will be mentioned but will not be the main focus for everyone that is watching this video i hope you're taking notes because as mentioned this is the proven formula to get your dream project and you just need to follow the steps or you'll simply need to pre-watch the video which is fine too [Music] then plug a few of those keywords into google and see how many results come back look at what the top performing posts are and click on them um and here are some metrics and to look for in each article how many words does each top performing article have most of the time the top posts on google have between two and three thousand words um some do have more than ten thousand words and things like that and some have even less but the best would be if you can write a blog post at least to start with you know two to three thousand words and next look into uh what keywords do those authors seem to focus on you know just figure out what words they use often within the blog what's titles um what it like what is the title of their article is it how to do something is it five steps to you know this and that like do you see any pattern and what could you do better so if it's for a skincare project can you write about sustainable packaging or product photography or whatever you think would be valuable to a reader and as mentioned doesn't need to mean you offer those services but the goal is to get people to click on your blog read it and contact you so the more value you can provide the better um so this initial research will show you a lot um we we recently used this strategy to try to um to attract a tea client and when we googled tea branding you know what came up what do you think chris uh that someone who sells yeah so someone who sells um tea blends what do you think that they would um type into google even though if you know that they they need branding but what is that that they would type okay so i'm a person a manufacturer who makes tea and tea blends and i'm looking for someone to help me with branding yes what would i type in a [Music] tea packaging design that is correct yes so even though i offer services as you know i offer branding and what we as designers think of you know is not exactly the same what potential clients would think you know what is the most important to them is packaging but we would maybe think about logos maybe brand strategy logos um colors fonts you know all those things well what they care about is packaging so if we wrote a post about branding our potential clients uh may not find it and we need to meet them like where they are so we wrote a post um that focused on tea packaging um that include you know so we included tea packaging in the title and then we talked about tea packaging and throughout the blog throughout the article and we also mentioned branding and of course they had call to action at the end so um one of my favorite hacks for this step two is to plug sur plug uh search terms into google and see what google gives you back in the people also ask section so here's a screenshot so you can see what i mean so under people also ask google is giving you um like strings of words that people are typing in this is so helpful i recommend you use some of these as your subheadings within the blog so if you were using this strategy for coffee shop branding your blog post would have a section called how do you brand a coffee shop and another piece of your blog could be what makes a coffee shop stand out and another section would be what is a good coffee shop name so after you have all this information you will outline your blog post and it will look something like this so you have a title idea based on the other titles you found that have been effective then you have heading ideas for each section of your post and under the headings you will write paragraphs to to fill in the gaps right so do you see how every single thing in your outline came from somewhere it came from either um your ideal client persona or your google research like we didn't just randomly make it up and i've seen this mistake i've seen a lot of creatives and graphic designers like they they make this mistake because they write i don't know about like logo designs they write about website designs but they're not focused on the um on the client and what is exactly that the client would search the next step is to write a hyper-targeted blog post so now you're going to write the blog post um like targeted specifically to this project and this ideal client you came up with so writing the blog post will take some time but if you outlined the post piece by piece like i recommended um and you already know what each section header is then it's just a matter of um like working your way through and and and writing the outlining is honestly way more important than um than the writing um and here are some writing tips um when you are ready to make your post so give yourself permission to jump around from section to section and there is no rule that says you need to write the post um like in order use examples so if you are writing about um coffee shops mention starbucks um you know if you're writing about skincare about skincare line mention olay just give examples write like you talk so your reader is a human and even if your own brand is high-end and professional you want them to relate your post on on a human level so don't just add a bunch of complicated words to to sound smart because they will not understand it after you did your um research and wrote a super valuable blog post for your future ideal client you need to know just a little bit about seo i am not an seo expert so nothing too crazy but just knowing the difference between h2 and text makes all the difference to google and i'll mention that as well um and you know so i'll tell you just the basics to help you structure your blog based on uh what we do for for our successful um blog posts so remember those um heather ideas you came up with uh what we had under um people also ask or people also search in google i think that we had an example like what makes a coffee shop stand out and well those headings serve two purposes so the first one is that they help your readers skim through um what they want so they don't click away and they show google what your post is about so when you make a heading in your blog post like don't just use regular text and put the words in bold this is what's with it this is true like we've really did this in the past so you need to make it in something called h2 text and um so that google recognizes that it's important and here is an example in my wordpress of what that looks like and although depending on your platform or version of wordpress this may look different for you but the point is to use text for um most of your content and h2 for all of your headings you can also use h3 if something is kind of a header but not as important um there are you know h3 h4 and five and so on uh but that's now um getting too much into the details of seo and to be honest we um we don't really use those um so feel free to pave it to play with it um but i don't think that level of detail is you know as important next is images so when someone is reading your post you want to break up the text with images so it's easier on their eyes so break up the longer paragraphs and add images in between because sometimes if we um if we start reading a blog post that is super super long and unless it's super super engaging we click away so it has to be easy for us and for i mean for your clients to to be able to read make sure your images are horizontal i've seen vertical images and then people have to like scroll scroll scroll to get to the um next section um so you don't want your readers to to scroll too far to get to the next paragraph and in addition to um to stock images or your own images you can also add like inline forms in your posts so that um and that gives readers an opportunity to sign up for for your email list so once you have images you need to add something to them called alt text alt text is basically a few words that you um attach to to each photo in your blog post and the alt text needs to describe what is um what is happening in that photo so is it someone typing on a laptop is it a packaging design if someone couldn't see the photo how would you describe it alt text helps google um rank your website higher especially if um if you can somehow include your keywords without forcing it and it also helps your users especially if the image doesn't load and it also describes the image to anyone who is visually impaired which is so important next is um your title and meta description so your title needs to be catchy and that's you know 100 the whole point is you want clients to to click on your post right and your meta description is the little blurb that um that people see when your post comes up in their google results like you can see here on the screen you can write this method description yourself and use keywords in it and um that can help you know get people to click on it and here's a i think that if you don't write a method description google will pull from random parts of your blog post so um you know maybe it will not be exactly what you wanted and maybe it won't be as attractive to to your ideal client and now as you know more about them and you know what would attract them it's better if you do it on your own versus letting google to to pick random sentences from your blog if you use wordpress i highly recommend the yoast plugin and it has a free version and can help you with all of those details as i mentioned in in our step four uh it will make sure your alt text and meta description are there and um and that you use um keywords the right amount of times and you know things like that now this is my favorite part so step fun five is called promotion and you may have heard that once you become a blogger or you use blogging to to get clients you need to promote your post right like you have to talk about them you have to share them on social media maybe even boost your posts and maybe even i don't know do some ads well for this we did zero promotion like zero like nothing absolutely nothing and this is why this formula is so powerful and we didn't do it just once we did like over and over again but i'll tell you um more about that in just a second so yeah maybe maybe we posted it on um on social media once at a time but we don't focus on social media we get clients through um you know word of mouth or um you know kind of like referrals or through our blog so we didn't really try to promote this blog post and or any other um blog post so yeah no promotion at all um and i just also want to mention that there might be some opportunities in i don't know maybe google ads facebook ads or you know something like that but luckily um i didn't have to figure that out because so here is what happened we wrote that blog post uh for the skincare client and that i mentioned and we went through all the steps i just walked you through and we continue to um to write other posts we didn't see any results like any results from that post at first we just let it be um look at how that skincare post performed on google for the first six months not great right the numbers on the left are the number of page views per week you can see um for the first six months it got minimal attention like zero or two page views per week for a lot of that time um and also if you are thinking but katie this was in 2020 when we had a pandemic you are right but this is just an example we have used this um same strategy before with pet products sports drinks which is which is quite interesting so we wrote a cool blog post about um sports drink packaging i think it was um and from that post we got a client that sells meal replacement shakes so it's not 100 what we thought we wanted but that project was even better if you ask me but let's go back to the skincare example now here is where it gets interesting so this graph shows uh months 7 through 12 of when the same skincare blog posts um like was was online and it again looking um it's again looking at the numbers of um you know page views per week so look at the numbers um on the left now instead of two page views a week like before we are now at 50 70 100 page views a week and it keeps going up from there like i wanted to know that we didn't change a single thing about this post it is the same post as before we didn't promote it and um the article didn't get featured in i don't know forbes didn't go viral or anything like that it was just there and i think that you know up it takes some time for google to figure out what is that that you're published so it simply um so that point about six months in is simply when google started to understand oh okay this post is about branding for skincare products and when you show it to people um who are looking for these keywords they click on it they read about that and they stay on that blog you know so we are now averaging about 100 page views a week from 95 unique visitors and this means that every single week 95 individuals who are searching for words around skincare branding or skincare packaging are finding our agency for the first time like very first time this number might not seem big and it's actually really tiny right but if i had to choose between getting five amazing leads from my ideal clients per week for you know ideal projects or getting 20 random ones well you know i would choose five ideal clients and with that said um just last friday we talked to a client who has a budget of forty thousand dollars a month um and just this monday uh we had an opportunity to talk to in an international skincare company that is looking for rebrands so we are not just getting more leads but better leads which is i would say even more important better clients over more more clients right um and you know they haven't signed the proposal yet but i'm i'm confident they will um and it's something i would have never thought was possible for me and my small branding studio here in austin but they all found us because of this blog so you know you can do the math here um even if only a small percentage of those skincare clients contact us and only a small percentage of those end up signing up to to work with us that's still really good now we are almost done with this presentation but i want to share one more thing uh so here is an example of a post we wrote on tea packaging design i think this is the most recent one um we followed the same exact six step formula i just shared with you and we don't even have six full months of data yet uh but not the same thing has already started to happen with our traffic right so for the first few months there were almost no page views and then at the five six month mark people are finding it organically on google in wage or in um like way larger numbers than they did before and it will you know just go grow from there and this is our last step this is uh repeat so when you implement this strategy when you look at all your and and when you look into all your blog posts together it will look a little bit of um mishmash like now we have one specific uh pose for pet products one for skincare one for sports drinks uh one for tea packaging because i'm still trying to get a tv client um so one reader wouldn't find value in every single one of your you know blog posts but that means you're doing it right okay let's go over the formula one last time step one identify the exact project and clients you would like to work with next step two research that industry client and seo practices so you can pick your keywords and outline your posts step three write your post tweak your structures like headings and alt text so it's seo optimized even more publish your posts and let google show it to the right people and repeat this formula whenever you think of a new client you want to work with so i hope that this formula helps freelancers land their dream projects as much as you know it helped me and chris i just did the summary after this show for you but if you would like to add something um go go ahead no i don't have anything to recap but i have questions to ask you specifically katie so if people want to find out more about you where can they go to see this the blogs in action okay um so where they can find me yep aventivestudio.com and then slash blog they will be able to find there you will see that we never stopped writing the generic ones but we do have a lot of um hyper targeted ones as well yeah okay so when did you start implementing the strategy to write hyper-targeted blog posts as a way to generate leads um so i think we started that about two or three years ago okay and what kind of results have you seen since like how many new projects and how much were they worth to you in the in the in the time that you've started doing this yeah so i think that this is something that completely changed um everything that i've ever done in in the past because i used to be um a solo freelancer and i always wanted to grow my studio i always wanted to hire and outsource and things like that and so these blog posts helped me actually do that because people were finding me through blog i was getting the ideal clients the ideal leads the bigger projects and i simply had to outsource and hire so it helped me scale it helped me grow and also i was getting better leads i think i mentioned that um during our call so instead of you know um charging i don't know just few hundreds uh for a logo and now i'm doing all these larger projects starting from you know brand strategy visual identity websites like we're now have a team of people and they're charging you know thirty thousand dollars fifteen thousand dollars so it's it completely changed the like everything in my business so we went from charging hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars by implementing the strategy yeah going from a solopreneur to a person who's managing a studio that is correct yeah how many people work for you today uh so i have one um full-time content developer and i have a lots of um freelancers and contractors so i have a few graphic designers i have a couple of web developers i have two web designers and i have someone who helps with social media so yeah wonderful i'm so happy for you wow yeah the number one challenge that creatives have is how to get discovered and they don't want to do outbound sales strategy this is a very effective inbound strategy and you're saying that don't expect miracle results right away that it could take somewhere between six to 12 months for it to really hit but when it hits you're finding the right kinds of leads attracting the right kinds of customers who are looking for you right now yes i know i was always afraid of doing something like this because i always thought that if i niche down i'm gonna exclude other people but it's quite the opposite you know even when we decided to specialize in you know wellness products it's it's still you know super broad and um and this strategy like really helped us like getting the the ideal projects so we were not focused on getting the ideal client but ideal project and it all started by me thinking okay so what is the next project i personally would love to work on like a skincare line like i would love to do packaging for them and so i was like okay how can i get a client that is looking for um for skincare packaging and then we came up with okay let's write this super available a cool blog post um and um and you know it all it all went from there i mean that wasn't the first one i i don't remember exactly which hyper targeted blog post was the first one um but it was um that one was really good and that one worked i think the best um so yeah great so who are all these people on your website yes so those are people who work for me and they're not my like official employees they're my contractors but they they're in between like part-time and full-time i see okay this is your extended team you're like running a fluid agency yes exactly okay so if i don't have the time to wait could i boost the blog post can i should i run an ad campaign an adwords campaign or something like that well probably we haven't tried that we haven't tried that um just because we were busy with other client work and then we see we saw the results in this like all of a sudden so yeah um i'm sure there are some and i'm sure there is room for improvement in terms of even even just adding more to that blog or doing google ads or facebook ads it depends where um the ideal client is hanging out right or even sharing on social just to help jumpstart the seo stuff right mm-hmm yes so if someone like me who has a decent sized social media following i could just take your exact blueprint your is it six steps yes six times the six steps and i can i could just put a little juice behind it by just starting to share it to my audience and then they'll check it out and then hopefully train the spiders from google to find it sooner right yes yep that's correct and you can also do paid partnerships where other people can share that blog for you it doesn't have to be paid but um there are people that do that as well if they have you know huge following um and you want them to share your blog then um you know you can do that too yeah so it's wonderful to be able to put out work so that you don't have to do sales and and and generate leads qualified leads for some very niched uh very specific targets uh are there other benefits from people discovering your content are you being invited to speak on podcasts or so what other benefits are there yeah so i think that the bigger benefits are just getting better clients and people who expect to um to pay more because they see you as an expert as a specialized graphic designer so i'm not getting all the random leads um i do public speaking um here in austin texas but that's mostly just educating entrepreneurs and startups about branding in general so not super niched and targeted and i did have a plan to go um for a cpg conference um in las vegas in 2020 but you know didn't happen are you active on social media um not really um we are on social media and we kind of post but we don't focus on social media um because as mentioned we get all the clients through our blog and i was going for a lot of networking events i know a lot of people so um it's word of mouth or blog so i'm not that active on social media i am active on social media when it comes to me educating graphic designers to do something like this and that's on aventive academy so that's not the mentive studio that's amazing academy and that's where i'm active on instagram so if people want to uh to learn more things like this they can find me there so go to eventif academy on on instagram yes and then that's where if you're a creative person you can get some of the training some of the things you're talking about today right yes that's correct okay fantastic yeah okay so katie thank you very much for sharing this i hope you guys enjoyed this presentation if you like this video go ahead and give it a thumbs up or leave a comment below and share it with somebody who needs to learn how to do this stuff [Music] yeah thank you chris for having me my pleasure thank you